The largest tech industries in the world are at war – not over patents, data, or the latest gadgets. The biggest fight in the offices of Google, Apple, and Microsoft is a battle for people.

Talent acquisition is the preeminent concern for companies looking to maintain a competitive advantage in today’s hottest industries. That’s where John Jersin and Ben McCann, two 31-year-old entrepreneurs, hope to make their mark.

They are the founders of Connectifier, a recruiting startup in Costa Mesa with an online search engine that locates qualified employees for companies looking for specific skill sets. It creates searchable candidate profiles by scouring the web for public work-related information about an individual, like a college website or online resume.

Potential candidates in Connectifier’s database may be cold-contacted by employers, even if they are not looking for a job. In some cases, their reputations can come into question if red-flags arise in the online information Connectifier gathers.

The extraction of public information on a large scale worries many privacy advocates.

Connectifier does not use personal sites like Facebook or Instagram to find information about individuals. And it does not pull information from the sites of competitors, such as Linkedin or Monster.

Clients who subscribe to Connectifier – for one or two years – can log-in through the startup’s portal, conduct a search of over 320 million profiles indexed by the company, and find candidates with the skills, experience and education they are seeking.

Connectifier says one thing it has that its competitors don’t is a technology called “entity recognition,” which is backed by artificial intelligence and determines if two different pieces of information refer to the same person.

It’s early days, but so far the company seems to be doing well. Its revenue has increased 487 percent so far this year from the same period in 2014, according to Jersin and McCann. The company, which has 30 full-time employees, also recently secured $6 million in funding led by San Francisco-based investment firm True Ventures.

Jersin and McCann have a story that reads like the rags-to-riches tales common to the founders of so many tech companies.They both majored in computer science at a top-tier college, started working as engineers at Google, came up with an idea and launched their company from a folding table in a storage closet in Irvine in 2012.

It was while working at Google that McCann and Jersin first identified the need for a service like Connectifier. While leading teams, the two engineers often experienced a lag time in productivity whenever a co-worker would leave Google for another company. At one point, McCann said, Google gave every employee a ten percent raise to prevent them from quitting for a better offer.

“For me, that experience really drove home the strategic importance of recruiting,” Jersin said. “If a company like Google could get hamstrung by recruiting, then anyone could and everybody probably was.”

COMPETITION

More than 1 million U.S. jobs have been added this year, according to The Bureau of Labor Statistics. The tech industry has been especially hot. The global tech market is expected to grow by 5.9 percent in 2016, according to market research firm Forrester.

Despite sharp employment growth, Connectifier will have to fight to succeed, since larger companies are also rushing in with technology to quench the corporate thirst for highly skilled employees.

Connectifier’s biggest competition is Linkedin, says Jersin. Linkedin’s first quarter revenue for 2015 was $638 million, an increase of 35 percent from a year earlier.

In March, Linkedin acquired Careerify, a Canadian startup whose search strategy resembles Connectifier’s. Companies can use Carrerify’s software to search their employees’ social networks for friends, colleagues and family members who might be qualified recruits.

“There are other startups that kind of pop up into this space all the time,” said Jersin. “At one point, we were tracking 100 different startups that were doing something vaguely similar to (Connectifier). At this point, in competitive sales deals with potential clients, we win over 95 percent of the time against all of those hundred startup companies.”

An internal Connectifier sales report echos Jersin’s claim, showing 95 to 97 percent win rates in securing sales deals against top competition. Jersin attributes this to what he considers Connectifier’s superior technology and high quality staff.

One of Connectifier’s main competitors, however, says Jersin’s numbers don’t add up.

“That’s not even close to the data we have,” said Jon Bischke, CEO of San Francisco-based Entelo. “As a rule, we don’t reveal our close rate compared to that of the competition. What we do know is that when we go head-to-head against the competition – and that includes Connectifier – we win more often than not.”

Entelo increased its earnings by 80 percent in the second quarter of this year and has secured Telsa, ESPN, Facebook and Pinterest as customers, Bischke said.

He said his company regularly wins over clients because it offers a suite of products that is “more mature” than Connectifier’s offerings. Entelo – which employs about 50 people – has an algorithm that identifies employees who are more likely to leave their jobs, and a tool that locates under-represented candidates to increase diversity.

Another company with strong backing is Monster’s TalentBin, a recruiting search engine it acquired last year. A juggernaut in the employment sector, Monster’s second quarter revenue this year was $180 million.

“Connectifier is a small startup that has far fewer resources at its disposal as compared to a public company like Monster,” Chris Sicuranza, a Monster spokesperson, said via email.

“Conversely, TalentBin has invested millions into its search algorithm, ensuring that you have multiple ways to cut across the plethora of data that we offer – over 300 million profiles,” he said.

There may be no clear winner in the industry at present, but Connectifier is expecting to double its number of employees by the end of the year, said Jersin.

PRIVACY

The race to be crowned the Google of online recruiting is speeding up, but that doesn’t mean the industry is without controversy. Thousands of companies that collect and store data about internet users have sprouted up in recent years to profit from their findings – much to the dismay of privacy advocates.

Irina Raicu, director of the Internet Ethics Program at Santa Clara University, is concerned about the data collection methods of Connectifier and other online companies that gather public online information. She points to changing times and advancing technology as reasons for the erosion of privacy.

“It used to be hard to get someone’s public records and aggregate that information,” said Raicu. “There was a certain level of privacy built into the system unintentionally because people had to go to the courthouse to look that information up. Now, it is all accessible online.”

The problem, she said, is that people are losing control over what other people know about them. “It doesn’t seem like you’d have control over what you’d like a potential employer to know. Someone else is taking that away.”

A recruiter using Connectifier’s technology can contact someone who may not even be looking for a job. “A handful of people have asked us to remove their information, and we are happy to do that – but that’s only a handful,” said Jersin. “The news that an employer is interested in you is not disappointing news.”

But not everyone receives that happy phone call.

A candidate in Connectifier’s database might lose out on a job without ever knowing it, said Rob Shavell, a co-founder of the online privacy company Abine. If a red flag arises during a Connecifier search, the candidate never gets a chance to explain the information that could damage his chances of being hired by the company and even undermine him with future employers, he said.

Shavell added, “Most of the time if you are really harmed by these decisions, they are all happening behind the scenes. These companies are taking, aggregating, collecting and selling information for the use of other third parties to make decisions about us that really do affect our lives and our careers.”

According to a 2014 Pew Research Center Survey of 607 American adults, 61 percent said theywould like to do more to be anonymous online. And88 percent said it is difficult to delete inaccurate information about themselves.

Jersin conceded that information found online isn’t always accurate. “I don’t think any search engine…claims that everything on the internet is true,”he said. “We are simply representing what is out there online.”

Many people don’t understand that by posting and browsing on the web, their information is gathered and widely used by data collection companies, Raicu said. According to Shavell, the more specific and personal the information is, the more money data collection companies can get for it.

“It still seems to come as big surprise to a lot of people that so much of what they do online is being collected and collated,” said Raicu. “It’s important for people to understand how pervasive the tracking is and that it’s not a necessity and not required to get the good things we all use the internet for.”

Despite the privacy concerns and fierce competition, Connectifier is pressing on. “The same way that Google finds information that is on the internet, we find information on the internet,” said Jersin. “We are a search engine as much as Google is, we are just optimized for a certain purpose.”

Jenna L. Jones is an editor and journalist who writes about everything from tech startups to beachside weddings. She regularly enjoys a crisp glass of chardonnay with her husband and two lazy dogs at her home in Long Beach, California. Follow her on Twitter @JLJonesOCR

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